Interview with Open Source Advocate Keith Curtis on Software Wars

The impact of software has changed our lives. But the average technology consumer doesn't realize how important having access to source code and an open development process is to our overall freedom. Keith Curtis, a University of Michigan dropout turned decade-long programmer at Microsoft turned open source advocate, wants to change that.

On his website, Curtis says, "We need to pool our collective intelligence and get to work on fixing our most serious threats—and in today's society that begins with having great software." In his book, After the Software Wars, Curtis exploits the flaws in the proprietary software development model. And today, he's taking the whole thing mainstream by making a film.

"If you can control the software, its like controlling the flow of oil," says Linux creator Linus Torvalds in a trailer promoting Software Wars. Other free software advocates are also featured in the promo.

We caught up with Curtis during the final days of his Indiegogo campaign to discuss the hopes for the new film.

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Samsung stopped the distribution of the Android 8.0 Oreo operating system update for its Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones due to unexpected reboots reported by several users.
SamMobile reported the other day that Samsung halted all Android 8.0 Oreo rollouts for its Galaxy S8/S8+ series of Android smartphones after approximately a week since the initial release. But only today Samsung published a statement to inform user why it stopped the rollouts, and the cause appears to be related to a limited number of cases of unexpected reboots after installing the update.

The Xen Project is comprised of a diverse set of member companies and contributors that are committed to the growth and success of the Xen Project Hypervisor. The Xen Project Hypervisor is a staple technology for server and cloud vendors, and is gaining traction in the embedded, security and automotive space. This blog series highlights the companies contributing to the changes and growth being made to the Xen Project and how the Xen Project technology bolsters their business.

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Introduced as part of LunarG's recent Vulkan SDK update is the VLF, the Vulkan Layer Factory.
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Amazon Linux 2 - Who nicked my cheese?

So far, it's a relatively benign, easy introduction to a new operating system that blends the familiar and new in a timid package. Perhaps that's the goal, because a radical offering would right away scare everyone. Amazon Linux 2 is an appealing concept, as it gives users what Red Hat never quite did (yet) - A Fedora-like bleeding-edge tech with the stability and long-term support of the mainstay enterprise offering. But then, it also pulls a Debian/Ubuntu stunt by breaking ABI, so it will be cubicle to those who enjoying living la vida loco (in their cubicle or open-space prison).
Having lived and breathed the large-scale HPC world for many years, I am quite piqued to see how this will evolve. Performance, stability and ease of use will be my primary concerns. Then, is it possible to hook up a remote virtual machine into the EC2 hive? That's another experiment, and I'd like to see if scaling and deployment works well over distributed networks. Either way, even if nothing comes out of it, Amazon Linux 2 is a nice start to a possibly great adventure. Or yet another offspring in the fragmented family we call Linux. Time will tell. Off you go. Cloud away.

Updates From OpenIndiana and LibreOffice (Projects That Oracle Discarded)

The OpenSolaris/Illumos-based OpenIndiana operating system has finally moved past GCC 4.9 as its base user-land compiler and is now using GCC 6.4.
This comes while GCC 8.1 should be officially released in the next few weeks and they are already targeting GCC 7.3.0 as their next illumos-gate compiler.

The Document Foundation announced recently that its LibreOffice 6.0 open-source and cross-platform office suite reached almost 1 million downloads since its release last month on January 31, 2018.
That's terrific news for the Open Source and Free Software community and a major milestone for the acclaimed LibreOffice office suite, which tries to be a free alternative to proprietary solutions like Microsoft Office.
The 1 million downloads mark was reached just two weeks after the release of LibreOffice 6.0, which is the biggest update ever of the open-source office suite adding numerous new features and enhancements over previous versions.

FreeBSD Finally Gets Mitigated For Spectre & Meltdown (and Hugs)

Landing in FreeBSD today was the mitigation work for the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities.
It's taken a few more weeks longer than most of the Linux distributions to be re-worked for Spectre/Meltdown mitigation as well as DragonFlyBSD, but with FreeBSD Revision 329462 it appears their initial fixes are in place.
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